Background: Schools are responsible for promoting LGBTQ+ students' academic success, yet many LGBTQ+ students contend with unsupportive learning environments. Gender-Sexuality Alliances (GSAs)--clubs that affirm students' sexual orientation and gender diversity--could promote academic engagement and protect against disaffection. Aims: We aimed to…

School belonging can facilitate positive youth development and educational outcomes. Given that LGBTQ+ youth face marginalization in schools, there is a need to identify school supports that could still promote their sense of school belonging. We considered Gender-Sexuality Alliances (GSAs) as LGBTQ+ affirming school clubs. Among 92 LGBTQ+ student…

Students' experiences of boredom at school are receiving increased research attention. Most inquiries to date have focused on how often students experience boredom in classroom situations and in specific subject areas. Despite its frequency, limited research efforts have explored how students' boredom experiences might inform positive education…

Utilizing a person-centered approach, the present study explored two-hundred and sixty-five adolescents' reports of self-disclosure, help, conflict, and conflict resolution with a close friend to investigate variability in profiles of friendship quality, whether gender and gender homophily and ethnicity homophily of friends are associated with…

Most US students attend coeducational classes, but to what extent do students feel integrated into the entire classroom of their peers, especially with other-gender peers? The major goal of this research was to investigate how variations in gender integration (GI), measured by students' expectancies about inclusion, efficacy, and social costs of…

Crucial skills for early adolescents to develop include respecting people from different backgrounds, showing empathy and compassion, and making ethical decisions in challenging situations. This exploratory study aims to understand the extent to which "students' perceptions of teacher caring and belonging related to changes in their…

Many first-generation college students -- whose parents have not obtained a four-year college degree -- experience a "cultural mismatch" due to a lack of alignment between the independent values of their university (consistent with the culture of higher education) and their own interdependent values (consistent with working-class…

Women in physics and engineering continue to remain underrepresented in higher education. To illuminate underlying processes, we used data from undergraduate Physics students (N= 338) enrolled in an introductory physics course to investigate the development of field belonging and its association with gender and perceived competence. Latent change…

Contemporary models emphasize linkages between malleable positive psychological orientations and enhanced quality of life. As such, it is important to consider if these positive orientations provide unique explanatory power beyond the long-established relations between quality of life and within-person, less malleable personality traits. This…

Background: School equity refers to the extent to which students are treated fairly, ensuring that each student receives what they need to be successful. School staff can play a vital role in creating an equitable school climate for adolescents, but little is known about how staff perceive equity in their school and how this in turn may relate to…

Poor school connectedness (SC), defined as students' feelings of belonging, safety, and fairness at school, is a risk factor for negative psychosocial outcomes. Few studies have examined the specific relationship between SC and anxiety. This study examined the relation between SC and anxiety within a group of 114 clinically anxious youth (mean age…

Bullying bystanders' reactions are important for either stopping or perpetuating bullying behaviors. Given school-based bullying programs' focus on bystanders, understanding the associations between school-level factors and individual bystander responses can improve intervention efficacy. Data from 64,670 adolescents were used to examine bullying…

In spring 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic thrust nearly 56 million students in the United States into remote education. By fall 2020, states' and school districts' differing public health measures resulted in the adoption of varying COVID-adapted learning modalities (i.e., in-person, remote, and hybrid). Using daily diary data with a nationally…

Background: Given its ability to exacerbate health inequities through its disproportionate impact on low-income communities, the need exists to better understand factors that influence substance use among adolescents. Moreover, given its multi-etiological nature, preventing adolescent substance use requires addressing intrapersonal, interpersonal,…

The "Psychological Sense of School Membership" (PSSM) scale has been used for more than 20 years to measure students' sense of school belonging, yet its psychometric properties have had limited examination with pre-adolescent children. This study investigated the utility and psychometrics of the PSSM in three primary school samples from…